Follow Us

Social Media Newsfeed: Quora’s Future | Google Phone

Quora Says it Will Expand Beyond Question-and-Answer Format (SocialTimes)
In a end-of-year blog post, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo hinted that the question-and-answer platform will move into “other formats” in an attempt to bring more knowledge online and searchable. “Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge. Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up,” D’Angelo wrote.

Quora Says it Will Expand Beyond Question-and-Answer Format (SocialTimes)
In a end-of-year blog post, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo hinted that the question-and-answer platform will move into “other formats” in an attempt to bring more knowledge online and searchable. “Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge. Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up,” D’Angelo wrote. TechCrunch The clarification of Quora’s mission statement also expressed the site’s intention to give an audience to people who have insight but aren’t famous. D’Angelo’s statements position Quora to increasingly compete with other knowledge bases, as well as publishing platforms. GigaOM D’Angelo doesn’t mention what other formats this vision might include, but Quora’s founders have often talked about how the site was designed in part out of frustration that not enough Internet users had blogs, either because they were too difficult to set up or required too much investment of time. Twitter is obviously one attempt to solve this problem — as are other platforms like Medium, the content startup founded by former Twitter CEO Evan Williams. Wired D’Angelo’s statement claims that shortcomings elsewhere online in terms of how easy it is in practice to create a website or build an online following will lead people to use Quora as an information-sharing platform instead. Business Insider has interpreted the “Library of Alexandria” ambition as an indirect challenge to Google, whose own mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. WebProNews From the beginning, Quora has captured a unique user base of thoughtful entrepreneurs, engineers and tech industry “experts.” It doesn’t get an enormous amount of media coverage, but it is a place where a lot of smart and interesting people answer a lot of questions.

Google Will Release its Own Phone in 2013 (SocialTimes)
Google will leverage its acquisition of Motorola to build a sophisticated phone it hopes can compete with the iPhone, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The phone is known internally as the X Phone and will be released sometime next year, according to the report.

Facebook Promotes Poke with Message in iPhone App (AllFacebook)
Facebook is promoting the Poke iPhone application it introduced Friday with promotional messages that appear atop the news feeds of users accessing the social network via its iPhone app. The promo message contains the Poke icon and describes the Poke app as “A fast and fun way to say hello with videos, photos, and messages,” followed by a “Get the App” button.

Social Media Stock Tracker: Gains for Angie’s List | Instagram’s Snafu (SocialTimes)
The social media sector was up an average of 2 percent last week and is heading toward 2013 with an average gain of 13 percent in 2012, despite incredible volatility along the way. While recent negative sentiment on AAPL shares continued to overshadow the sector, ANGI led the week with a 12 percent gain, mainly as a result of increased positive equity research coverage.

Obama Takes to YouTube to Address Online Gun Control Petitions (SocialTimes)
President Barack Obama recorded a video response to the online petitions on the White House’s site, WeThePeople, asking him to address gun control and school safety. Petitions that garner 25,000 signatures on the site get a written response from the White House, but few get a video response starring the president.

Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Niche Retailers Than to Major Sites (SocialTimes)
Pinterest users aren’t clicking over to big-name e-commerce sites at the rate that some industry watchers have suggested, according to a study from Compete Analytics. The data shows that the bulk of Pinterest visitors click through to other social networking sites and search engines.

Vimeo Releases 2012 End-of-Year Stats (SocialTimes)
The end of 2012 is almost here, and Vimeo has released its “Official Year-end Self-Appraisal and Profound Introspection,” complete with some pretty impressive stats. It’s been a big year for the video-streaming site, from the launch of the new Vimeo back in January to a redesigned iPhone app, an Xbox app, a Tip Jar feature that lets creators make money off their videos, pay-to-view movies and more.

[emailonly]Here are today’s leading Facebook apps brought to you by AppData.com[/emailonly]